It Takes Eight Days to Submit, Approve & Reimburse One Expense Report. Not Any More
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Your finance team is getting ready for an audit – lining up all the paperwork and updating spreadsheets and financial software. But you realize that some expense reports are missing and the pandemic has forced most of your employees to email their reports for expense reimbursement. But somewhere between the home and office, while managing a growing pile of receipts, the accountant misplaced $500 worth of expense reports.
If you’re an accounts payable (AP) professional, this scenario might sound familiar. Filing and processing receipts involves too many steps: printing, scanning, coding, etc. And for 62% of businesses, all the manual work that goes into expense-related data entry is the biggest hurdle.
AP teams are looking for simpler solutions to tackle their expense-related challenges. For many, automation has been the game-changer. Using Beanworks’ Expense Management, both staff and business can engage with each other dynamically through the cloud, rather than on paper.
With Beanworks AP automation, employees can upload and submit expense reports through the web or mobile app
It means employees can stop stuffing receipts from a business lunch in their bag. Instead, they can just snap a picture and submit it through the Beanworks mobile app. 48% percent of businesses note this flexibility has added the most value to their expense management.
How much of “manual work” does automation remove?
Glad you asked! It takes eight days or more for an expense report to be submitted, approved, and reimbursed for 43% of organizations. Automation can save 69% of that time by managing everything from uploading receipts to reimbursements. With these time savings, 45% of organizations want to switch to automation within six months.
The benefits are realized by both parties – employees and accountants.
Before automation, team members would often wait until they physically returned to the office, before gathering all their expenses, entering them into a spreadsheet, printing copies, signing, submitting, and then… waiting to get reimbursed. With Beanworks, all of this can be done with a few clicks, regardless of where the employee is based.
Similarly, the accountant would also have to check the submitted paperwork, get approval, match receipts with line-items, enter data into accounting software, and then reimburse the employee. Beanworks takes much of this pain away with features such as automatic general ledger (GL) coding. These are automatically coded into the report as employees specify the expense type, based on the company’s categories.
Expense claims are not always true
In a survey of more than 1,000 employees, 85% admitted to lying about their claims in order to get reimbursed with more money. What’s shocking is that five percent confessed to misrepresenting information on every single report.
The majority of employees have lied on an expense report, and 82% have never been caught
With Beanworks, you can customize approval channels to ensure compliance with the company’s expense policies. It gives a full preview of spend based on details like department, location, and legal entity. All information is updated in real-time.
From crumpled receipts to sleek reports
A scrunched-up ball of random receipts might seem like a relic of the 20th century to employees whose lifestyle is embedded in technology. Beanworks AP automation frees such AP teams from manually crawling through hundreds of lines of bank statements and transactions.
Expenses can be managed through web and mobile easily. The software also integrates other AP workflows – purchase orders, invoices, and payments – so data flows seamlessly between Beanworks and your financial ERP.
Discover how Beanworks can transform your expense management.
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